To hatch a decent creative idea you need to have high quality stimulus, protect and nurture young ideas, and use unreasonable urgency to move rapidly to a prototype that will evoke a reaction.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

You can start a creative revolution at work by thinking and behaving differently. The secret lies in simple, practical learning about how creativity works.

The authors set up arguably the first innovation company in the UK called What If? The book outlines their philosophy and explains a process, and related workshops and exercises that allow you to follow their approach.

It is something of a call to arms – encouraging companies to manage the human mind more effectively, to add value and uniqueness to what they do, and to liberate creativity and innovation.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

You can easily follow the techniques for being more creative. They are:

1. Freshness: the quality of the initial stimulus has a direct bearing on how good the final ideas are. (River jumping exercises here include re-expression, looking at related worlds, revolution via challenging assumptions, and making random links)*

The title of the original book was What If?, which seems more relevant than Sticky Wisdom (this barely gets a mention in the body of the book)

*Many of these exercises are similar to those in other books, such as Adam Morgan’s Eating the Big Fish (re-expression/reframing), The Brand Innovation Manifesto by John Grant (related worlds/category stealing), and Wayne Lotherington’s Flicking your Creative Switch (random links/random word). That’s not a crime, but it’s worth being aware of the connections.